STERLING AVE., E. BELLAFONTE, W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW, ETC.
In the beginning, I had a small brown pleather
suitcase. It had red and blue racing stripes on the side. When I came
home to my mother’s, after two weeks at my father’s, my dog
would climb into it, with my clothes, and fall immediately asleep, as
if he was the one returning.
Eventually, the zipper on that suitcase
broke. I used it anyway, carrying it with two arms, one to hold the flap
shut. Things fell out in the car on the way to or from one of their houses.
I was always dropping things. They got annoyed.
Then I had a plastic KLM bag from our trip
to Europe with Mom. They gave it to us on the Dutch airplane, for things
we might bring home from the trip. It was a cheap, bright blue with white
lettering. It was only a square gym bag, not meant for heavy use. It didn’t
last long.
After that, I used garbage bags. At my mother’s
house they were the cheap white kind that sagged and tore easily. My father
had sturdy black ones, so I tried to stash a couple each time I was at
his house. With trash bags, you just tossed everything in each time. Lotion,
clothes, books, Raggedy Ann, shoes, towel, toothbrush, shampoo.
When I departed for college, where I would
live in the same room for a year, my father and stepmother bought me a
set of luggage. There was even a garment bag, with little gold hooks for
hangers at the top of it.

These are some of the stories that
I know. Other stories than the ones I usually tell. The first stories,
I guess. Stories of my first people, my intimates. I am tracing the thread
connecting us all. It has become unclear to me whether or not the thread
should be cut altogether.

STERLING AVE.
I’m ironing. I feel grown-up when
I iron. My father comes home late from work. When he’s late like
this, it’s usually because he went out for drinks after work. What
my mother calls “carousing.” My mother is in the kitchen.
They begin to argue. Their voices are low. I’m working on the sleeve
of a white shirt.
My mother begins to shout. I look up the
stairs to the front hallway. My parents are silhouetted by the living
room light. Their faces are close together, shouting. It’s the same
fight they always have. I glance away to the old piano. It has scars from
drawings I’ve made with my mother’s sewing pins. A crooked
house, a half-bent circle.
I look back up the stairs as my mother’s
voice rises. She spreads her hands flat against his chest and shoves him,
roughly. My father staggers.
My sister sifts down the stairs, a ghost.
She unclenches my fingers from the iron. She puts her hands on my shoulders
and lightly turns me away. She takes me across the basement in silence,
unlocks the sliding glass door, and pushes me outside. On the cement patio,
I turn to look back. She shuts the door, locks it, and vanishes into the
darkness.
I climb the long sloped stairs of the patio
and sit, listening to the breeze run through the oaks in our yard. I can’t
hear a thing from inside the house. I pick up a leaf and shred the flat
skin from the vein with my fingernails.

I was writing a story about a woman
who had lousy boundaries, who was psychologically disconnected, who didn’t
consider her own needs, because she didn’t understand that she might
matter. I was writing that story, but then I had to stop and write this.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
On the first Halloween after their separation,
my father bought three bags of candy for the trick-or-treaters who might
come to his new apartment. A bag of giant gummi Life Savers, a bag of
Butterfinger bars, and a bag of Dum Dum lollipops. We were at our mother’s
for Halloween, so the next weekend, at my father’s, we found the
candy. All three bags were unopened.
My sister and I asked him why the candy
was still there. He told us nobody had come to his door. After all, he
said, he lived in a second floor apartment. He was casual about it, and
went into the kitchen to fix us all dinner. My sister and I couldn’t
look at each other. My father had moved outside the world of children.
We left the candy untouched.

STERLING AVE.
When I was very young, my mother read
The Little Engine That Could aloud before I went to bed. She puffed
breathlessly and heaved and rolled her eyes when she read the line, “I
think I can, I think I can . . .” When it came to the part where
the little children wouldn’t have fruit or candy or toys, her voice
softened and sorrowed.
I sat beside her and gritted my teeth, willing
the small engine over the mountain, feeling my responsibility to believe
it could. The poor children! The sad-faced candies and vegetables!
One of these nights, my mother noticed that
my fists were clenched. She touched one of my hands and made a noise of
surprise. I stared down at the book. I could not look up. I was willing
the engine over the mountain. If I stopped, it would slide back.
When she began to read again, she peeled
back my fingers ceremoniously, one for each I think I can, I think
I can, I think I can. When the train made it over, she clasped my
hand joyously.
Together we chanted the last lines, I thought I could, I thought I
could.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
When our father shows us his apartment for
the first time, before he moves in, I walk into the stale little kitchen
and open the oven. Inside, it is teeming with cockroaches, which skitter
in one brown mass when the light hits them. I close the oven and walk
out of the kitchen.

STERLING AVE.
My mother’s occasional violence is
matched by my sister’s. They can be furious people. They are screaming
at each other. My door is closed and I try to read this book, Maggie,
I have out from the library. Maggie is a young pioneer in the West, and
there’s this gunslinger who is crazy about her. Maggie always knows
what to say. She’s very witty.
Out in the hall, they are screaming so loud,
I can’t even make out their words. They are both crying. My sister
slams her door. There is silence. My dog is downstairs, and I know he
must be frightened. I get up and open my door, hoping I can get downstairs
before they start again. My mother storms back down the hall and kicks
my sister’s door. The door cracks in half. My sister screams, this
time in terror. I stand in the hallway. My mother sobs, her head down,
then turns to me and grimly tells me to call my father.
I call him at his new apartment. There is
music on in the background. I ask him if he could please come over. He
wants to know what’s going on. I just say, you better come. When
he walks in the front door, I am waiting. I bury my face in his sweater,
rough, wool, smelling of smoke and rosemary. He must have been cooking
his dinner.
I fall against him. I bury myself against
him. I inhale him. He sets me carefully aside and walks upstairs to talk
quietly with my mother and my sister.
They are up there for two hours. I sit in
the living room in the dark. It is the last time I ever bury myself against
him, the last scene where we are a family.

STERLING AVE.
1979 From the diary: “I have a terrible
headache.”
1979 From the diary: “I’m sick.”
1979 From the diary: “I have a headache.”
1979 From the diary: “I’ve been
really sick.”

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
I wake up one weekend morning at my father’s.
I am lying in the narrow bed, across from my sister’s narrow bed,
trying to remember what the backyard looks like. I am still. I stare at
the ceiling, upset that I can’t remember what the backyard looks
like. Finally, I get up and look out. It’s a small, leaf-strewn
yard with a wire fence. It doesn’t look familiar.

STERLING AVE.
It’s kickball games in the cul-de-sac.
It’s wading in the tiny creek. It’s growing carrots in my
father’s vegetable garden. It’s a playhouse made of doors.
It’s dinner in the evening, and cold glasses of milk gulped down.
It’s an eight-track playing “The Purple Cow.” It’s
books and stuffed animals. It’s hamsters and piano lessons. It’s
my sister reading. It’s wearing dresses sewn by my mother. It’s
optimism in the seventies. It’s parents who go to parties where
they eat omelettes at midnight. It’s sleeping under the pear tree
with all the kids in the neighborhood. It’s parents who paint. It’s
parents who let you have a little glass of wine with dinner. It’s
laughing. It’s summer vacations. It’s grandparents who call
you honeypot and read you stories. It’s a dog you are training to
eat off a spoon. It’s building a boat with your father in the basement.
It’s a dream, a picture, bound to yellow and fade.

STERLING AVE.
1979 From the diary: “Diary, have
been sick for a long time. My parents are getting separated and I don’t
want them to hurt because I love them so much. I’m so sad but I
will love them more so they won’t get hurt. Your friend, Eliz. R.”
1979 From the diary: “I had two Thanksgivings.
One at Nags Head with daddy, and one at home with mommy. I’ve been
doing fairly well. I hope I get good grades. Thank you for reading these
boring comments. Eliz. R.”
1979 From the diary: “I have a headache.
I’m sorry to complain. Eliz. R.”
1980 From the diary: “On Dec. 23 my
parent’s divorce was final. We had Xmas morning with mom then had
to drive to my uncle’s in Richmond. We talked to dad on the phone.
Our car broke down in Fredericksburg and we sat all day at a Phillips
66 truckstop. Coming home in a rental car, we spun three times and landed
in a ditch. My new boy is Mark. He has a dimple and I never knew it. I
was sick awhile before Xmas and I was getting pretty nervous. I guess
I’ll go read some more. Eliz. R.”

STERLING AVE.
I stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom
and play out elaborate hostage scenes. Everyone in my family and neighborhood
is kidnapped. They are lined up in a cave, shackled to each other. The
guerrilla leader is captivated by me, and singles me out. If I will consent
to marry him, or at least be his girlfriend, he will spare the lives of
my family. To show me he means business, he tortures one person in the
lineup. It is usually someone who has been annoying me lately. It is only
my calm, sensible talk and my ability to charm this wild beast of a leader
that will save us. I have to lure him into letting his guard down, and
then I can rescue my whole family. It is easily within my power, and I
know it. I look over the line of my friends and family, to see how much
they need me.
I replay this scene in front of my mirror,
over and over again.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
At his first apartment away from us, my
father drinks. He drinks great big gallon jugs of burgundy wine. He drinks
cans of beer. He is an elegant man, but when he drinks too much, he gets
sloppy, weepy, giggly.
He drives us places when he’s drunk.
When this happens, my sister and I sit upright in our seats, staring at
the road. He weaves, gets lost, drives off the road. We are polite. We
say nothing. We don’t even know what words we might say.

Whenever people say “joint custody,”
it makes me think of actual joints: fingers, knees, elbows. Or roasts.
Or the hinged parts of chickens. I like a sharp knife for joints. I like
to slice through the webs of connective tissue with no resistance.
If it’s a crown of lamb, say, I cut
each bone free before I’ll even take a single bite. If no one is
watching, I put the bones against my teeth and nip at the bits of flesh
my fork and knife can’t reach. I lick and gnaw each bone clean and
then place them, curved and spooning neatly, at the edge of my plate.

STERLING AVE., E. BELLAFONTE AVE., STERLING AVE., E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
I blew on candles. I broke the dried wishbone
with eyes closed. I blew eyelashes. I knocked on wood. To the god of wishes,
I sent the usual plea. Happiness. Happiness. Happiness. Happiness for
us all.

SAYLOR PLACE
After my mother got divorced, sold our childhood
home, and took us on a trip to Europe, we came home from the trip and
needed a place to live. Around the corner, an older couple joined the
Peace Corps. We could live in their house for two years. Just long enough
to get us on our feet.
Most of our belongings went into storage.
We used their furniture, left their things
hanging on the walls. There were yellow butterfly curtains on the window
above my bed. In the morning they glowed.
The man had a heart attack and they came
back after six months.
We had to move right away.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
My father gets a lawyer. Someone tells my
sister and me that this woman’s nickname is “Barracuda.”
I have nightmares about her. In the dreams, there are hard, sharp scales
on her face. Every night she eats my father. I know that when she finishes
with him, she will eat me and my sister, but we cannot run away, we are
paralyzed.

SAYLOR PLACE
When my mother came home from work one day,
a month after we moved in, she found me on the stairs, where I’d
been sitting for six hours, motionless. She looked at me for a few minutes
and then she nodded slowly, pulled me to my feet, and took me outside.
She took me to the house we’d left
after the divorce. We walked in the dark yard, outside the periphery of
window light, looking in. My mother told me to say goodbye to each room.
We moved around the whole house this way, slowly. Past the hill where
my playhouse had been. Past the trees where the hammock had hung. Past
the patio. Past the woods where the creek was. Past my father’s
old garden. Under my parents’ window. Under my window. Under my
sister’s window.
In the dark of the house, outside of the
light, I shut my eyes and let a swarm of memories flow over me for each
room. I murmured goodbye, goodbye, to each room, as though they were living
things that would miss me.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
The first Christmas I woke up to the noise
of pounding. I sat up and wondered what it was. I walked out into my father’s
apartment. There was the tree. There were some gifts under the tree. My
mother was to arrive at nine. I felt a tremor of excitement. I wondered
what time it was. Then there was the sound of someone crying in the hallway.
I opened the door and my mother was curled on the steps, her head bent
over her lap, bags of gifts all around her. She lifted her tearstained
face to me and spoke between ragged breaths. “Couldn’t you
hear me? Didn’t you know I was here?” She held up her hands
like a surrender and broke down completely.

E. BELLAFONTE AVE.
It is my second date ever. The boy and I
are in the backseat of my father’s orange Honda. We’ve been
at the dance and my date’s face is flushed, sweet looking. My father
is definitely drunk, which doesn’t surprise me but mortifies me.
I watch the dark road ahead of us as the
boy gives my father directions to his house. The boy and I don’t
hold hands, and now he knows that my father is a drunk. I am watching
what the headlights scare up, wishing the ride were over. There is an
orange cone in the headlights. It is unclear, even to me, what kind of
construction this is, but right away we all know my father has chosen
the wrong route.
“Oh,” my father says in surprise.
The car bumps down off the asphalt and soon
we are thumping, jerking, scraping loudly over dirt hills. The boy lets
out a pleased whoop and I clutch the seat beneath me, feeling the ground
fall away under us in great lurches. In that instant, I find I hate them
both.

To move (from the Webster’s Dictionary):
To pass from one position to another
To change one’s place of residence
To have regular motion
To touch, affect with tender feeling
To sell or be sold
To transfer a piece in a game

W. WALNUT ST.
When I met the woman who was to become my
stepmother, I came with my sister for dinner at my father’s house.
We were at my mother’s for the two weeks, but our father invited
us over for a special dinner. It was unusual. I don’t remember why
our mother let us go. It seems out of character.
When we got there, we stood around chatting
in the kitchen with my father, who seemed nervous. He told us there was
someone he wanted us to meet. When she came around the corner, peering
from the other side of the refrigerator, I was startled to see that she
wore green eye shadow. She had elaborate eyes anyway, large and blue,
but this eye shadow was something. My mother did not wear eye shadow.
Nobody’s mother I knew did.
She was nervous. She twisted a Kleenex.
At some point, she caught my eye and winked at me in a friendly way.
Except for the fact that she was there to
steal my father’s heart from me, permanently, I liked her.

W. WALNUT ST.
We flew to Michigan for the wedding. The
alarm clock in the hotel room I shared with my sister did not go off.
Our uncle came to our room and woke us up. The wedding was in an hour
and we had to leave right away. We didn’t get to shower. We threw
on our clothes. All day I fidgeted with the small belt on the hand-me-down
dress I wore. I felt ugly, unprepared, exposed.
There were a lot of people at the wedding,
but only my grandparents, my uncle, aunt, my sister, and I were there
for my father. Everyone else was there for my new stepmother. People were
nice to us. My sister and I did what our grandparents and aunt and uncle
did. We smiled. We made small talk. We behaved. We tried not to notice
what was happening, how my father was consumed in that room full of people
we didn’t know.

W. WALNUT ST.
My sister fights with my stepmother in a
way I can’t yet. They scream at each other about domestic things.
The way the toilet paper is hung, the way my sister and I leave our shoes
in the hall. My sister risks saying things I can never say. She screams
horrible truths that must cost us all to hear aloud, and that’s
when I see it doesn’t matter anyway. Nobody’s listening.
My sister starts missing weeks. She has
excuses; friends, drama club, high school.
I go ahead without her, back and forth.

W. WALNUT ST.
The house is silent. The shades are drawn.
It is three thirty in the afternoon, on a Tuesday. I am just home from
school. There are dirty dishes in the sink. Evidence of tuna sandwich
makings on the counter.
The dining room shades are drawn. The living
room shades are drawn.
A door clicks open upstairs. My stepmother’s
voice, “Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she says, the swishing
noise of her silk nightgown as she pads farther down the hall to look
at me at the bottom of the stairs. “Your father will be home at
seven.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll eat then.”
“Okay.”
“How was school?”
“Fine.” I am looking up the
stairs at her. The hall blind is drawn, too. I moved in last night, after
she’d gone to her room for the night. It is my first day of the
two weeks with them.
She turns and walks back to her bedroom.
The door clicks again as she shuts it behind her.
I climb the stairs to the room that I sleep
in. I open both windows. I unpack my bag of clothes and books and toiletries,
which I didn’t get a chance to do last night or before school in
the morning. I take my things out of the drawers and closet and spread
them around the room. I find the book I left last time in a drawer, glad
it isn’t finished yet. I put my clothes in the three bureau drawers
that are kept clear for me.
I want to go downstairs but I don’t
want to sit in the dark. To begin opening shades might cause my stepmother
to come out again, another excruciatingly polite exchange. The nothingness
of those interactions.
Since I have been at my mother’s for
two weeks, it is considered impolite for me to make plans with friends
on my first night back. We are supposed to have a family meal. My father
will be home at seven. After the first twenty minutes when he needs to
be alone and unwind, I can sit in the kitchen with him while he makes
dinner. Lights will be turned on. I can go into the other rooms and pull
up the shades while he’s in the kitchen. My stepmother will dress
and come down. My father will make jokes or ask questions about things
that were going on with my friends two weeks ago when I was here. I will
tell him, both of them, the stories.
I sit on the bed. My clock is unpacked.
It is four o’clock. Three hours until dinner.
Four streets over, my mother, my sister,
and my dog are doing their thing. I will see them again in two weeks.

W. MASONIC VIEW
It is Christmas day. We are with our mother
for the morning, but at noon we are to go to our father and stepmother’s
house. Even though it has been a couple of years, Christmas is still strange,
weighted. Everything is in slow, careful motion. We open gifts, eat breakfast
around the tree, talk. It gets closer to twelve.
My mother says, quietly, “I know you
girls have to get ready.”
My sister and I take turns showering. We
put on the new quilt-style jackets our mother has made for us. When we
come down the stairs, our mother is sitting alone on the couch. Her back
is to us. Her hair is still messy from sleep. She is staring at the Christmas
tree. When she sees us in our jackets, she jumps up to take pictures of
my sister and me sitting together on the porch swing outside. It is twelve
fifteen. We can’t really bring ourselves to smile. We sit next to
each other. We sit like statues of daughters. It is twelve twenty-five.
The phone rings.
My mother answers it, “Merry Christmas!”
Then there is arguing. My mother comes back
to the porch, but now she is crying. She starts to say something but she
can’t finish. I go into the kitchen and pick up the phone. On the
other end, my father is angry, demanding us, telling me that we are unfair
and selfish to keep them waiting, when they’ve been waiting all
morning for us.
We leave our mother, although she is still
crying.
When we get to our father’s, he apologizes
gruffly for the argument. My stepmother is quiet. Christmas music plays
on the stereo. There are presents to open. The sound of tearing paper
makes me want to scream, but I do not.

W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW, W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW
I bark my shins on the tables. I thump into
walls. I slip on floors in my socks. I drop bowls, glasses, spoons. I
spill juice. I fall out of bed. I nick the backs of my hands on the dining
room table. I stub my toes on the couch feet. I twist an ankle, break
fingers, step on another rusty nail. I slam my thumb in the car door.
I lose necklaces, earrings, rings. I burn food. I lose keys. I over-salt
things. I forget.

W. WALNUT ST.
My father is making guacamole in the blender.
He takes the lid off, he puts the wooden spoon in. The blade catches the
spoon. The ceiling, the counters, my father are thickly green. It is caught
in his eyebrows, and he blinks and laughs, we both laugh, we can’t
stop laughing. He whispers, “There’s onion in my eyes.”
We laugh harder. I fall off the stool where I was watching him. I sit
on the floor, unable to get up.
My stepmother comes in the room. Scowling,
beyond furious. She can’t see what’s so goddamned funny. If
the goddamned fool had listened to her and never put the spoon in the
blender, this mess would have been avoided. She’s told him not to
put anything in the blender while it’s running. And if he’s
damaged her expensive blender, he’s going to replace it. It’s
a good blender. It’s hard to replace. He won’t be able to
replace it. He better hope it isn’t ruined.
My father washes his eyes in the sink. I
climb up on the counter to begin wiping the cabinets. She leaves the room.

The stepmother in fairy tales always
gets a raw deal. (It is interesting to note that the prefix, “step-,”
comes from Old English, and means, “orphan.”) She’s
always evil or jealous or cruel. She’s ugly, or worse, once pretty.
In real life, though, she’s only someone
who is not your mother. One step away.
She belongs to your father, who used to
belong to you before she came along.
She’s at your father’s side,
but she’s not your mother.
You hiss this at her.
You tell her with your mother’s eyes.
With your father’s hands.
With your sister’s laugh.
You tell her all the time, sometimes without
meaning to, You Do Not Belong Here.
And so she shrivels, hates, turns cruel.

W. MASONIC VIEW
It was a small colonial house on a block
full of young families. My mother’s room was in the attic, a long,
hot, brown-paneled room over our heads. You could find her up there, sitting
on her bed, looking out the tiny attic window. She cried a lot.
Then she decided to go back to college.
She got a couple of part-time jobs and attended classes. We didn’t
have much money. Our mother made food for us on weekends, to last the
week. Onion pie, spaghetti pie, hot dogs, chili.
My sister had friends who invited her over
often. She ate dinner with friends, spent nights with friends. When she
was with her friends, she laughed a lot. When she was at home, she didn’t
laugh. She stayed in her room.
When I came back for the two weeks with
them, often there was no one home. I didn’t mind. It gave me a chance
to look around, check the fridge for what they’d been eating, look
in their rooms for what clothes they’d been wearing, see if the
house had a good mood feel or a bad mood feel. It gave me time to unpack
my things, set up my camp, make it look like I’d been there longer
than I had. It made the stink of betrayal, life at my father’s,
less pungent.
I imagined they could almost forget I had
been gone.

I dream a feast, at a table under the
trees in my someday backyard. The table is long, and set with candles
and jars of wildflowers I have picked earlier in the day with friends.
Oh look! My mother is there, always beautiful, and even, in this dream,
happy. Look how she laughs and captivates the children. She turns a daisy
into a bird and lets it fly away. I set a tray of cheese and crusty bread
in the middle of the table. There are bowls of olives and goat cheese
and grapes.
In the middle of the table surrounded by
my closest friends, my knowledgeable father strokes the long white beard
he’s grown and answers questions about gravity, the temperature
of the brain, why crows chase hawks. When they ask him to explain the
nature of love, he laughs, points to me, and cries out, You’ll have
to ask my youngest daughter about that, for she is even teaching me!
My sister comes up from a field of Queen
Anne’s lace, dusting dirt from her hands. She has buried a plate
of hollowed bones in the soil out there. One of the children asks her
what she will grow and she tells them to look first thing in the morning.
Instead of the purple gems in the flowers, she says, there will be red
pulsing hearts, tiny as peas. She says, winking, I am the caretaker of
passion.
Dusk comes out from the fields and I light
the candles on the table. We eat grilled peppers with our fingers, our
lips shining with oil. Our voices grow soft in the dark.
We don’t know it, but under the table
slugs climb the legs of our pants and the hems of our skirts, leaving
their glittering trails like veins for us to discover in the morning.

W. MASONIC VIEW
After two years of joint custody, my sister
finally decides to stay with my mother full time.
After the initial uproar, it is a respite.
Without her relentless anger, without her challenging everyone, it is
easier for me to hide in the routine of moving. There is no longer the
mounting tension of whether she will or won’t go.
But it also evens the households I move between, two against two.

My sister’s hands remind me of
weeping willow trees.
Her handwriting bears her in it: strong,
lean, comic loops, sharp angles of insight.
Sometimes I sat in her room when she wasn’t there. Touching her
drawing pencils, her books, her hairbrush, her make-up, pictures of her
friends, her Beatles albums, her eyeglasses.
If we did not have to become silent with
one another, for lack of what to say, she would have known that I loved
her more than anyone else, there was no one else whose side I more wanted
to be on.

W. WALNUT ST.
Sometimes I can’t stand to leave my
dog at my mother’s. I bring him with me even though, at my father’s
house, he has to stay in the kitchen. Sometimes, in the middle of the
night, I miss him so much that I go downstairs to the kitchen. I lie on
the linoleum with him in the dark.
Sometimes I feel guilty for making him do
this with me. I kiss him between his eyes. I rub his large ears. I rub
his belly. We look at each other. Then I walk to the back door and he
follows me. I open the back door and he runs out. He stops once in the
yard and looks at me, then turns and runs. He knows the way back to my
mother’s house.
After he leaves, I go up to the bedroom,
sit at the window, and cry. When my father asks about my dog in the morning,
I shrug and say, He must have gotten out somehow.

W. MASONIC VIEW
On Thanksgivings, my mother made it a point
to invite a person who didn’t have anywhere else to go.
I wondered why anyone would want to come
to our house. I worried if we would have enough food. I worried that something
would happen with my parents over the phone and ruin the day for the dinner
guest. I worried that I’d have nothing to say. I worried that I
wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the conversation. I worried
that we might have to seem normal.
Sometimes I took the upstairs phone off
the hook, just while we were eating.

W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW, W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW
I learned it from my father’s face.
From watching his expression go utterly blank. From watching him deflect
my mother’s fury or my stepmother’s irritation with dim, blurry
answers. With hunched shoulders. His complete withdrawal of self. His
mumbled sorrys. His occasional surprising rages.
I bet he knew when I did it, too. I bet
we both knew when the other was feigning vagueness, hiding the true self.
After all, he accepted my excuses when no one else would.
I want to believe he knew. I want to believe
there was some kind of unspoken communication between us. I hope that
he believed I could protect myself when he let me dangle, chained, between
his two wives, my two mothers. I want to believe that it cost him to lose
the expressions on my face. That it was not, as it seemed, that he let
me go without missing me.
That he let me hang in his stead.

In the dream, I am lounging on a comfortable couch in a warm, bright
room. There’s a Coke on the table next to me. My feet are on the
couch, I’m reading a book. I’m utterly relaxed. Somebody,
one of my parents, comes in, asks me if I want to go for a walk, or sailing,
or to a movie. I do not have to measure this, see what I’m supposed
to respond, what it might cost, if there’s a mechanism hidden inside.
I simply say, “Sure,” and we go.

W. WALNUT ST.
I am asked not to mention my mother’s
name at my father’s house.
My sister lives with my mother, so I stop
mentioning her, too.
Nor do I mention my family on my mother’s
side.
And my dog lives with my mother, so I try
not to mention him, either.

W. MASONIC VIEW
If I mention my father, accidentally, at
my mother’s house, it unleashes a stream of fury, recriminations,
accusations. Because I live with my father half the time, a lot of this
seems personal. So I try not to mention him when I’m there.

As a teenager, I resort to one of two facial
expressions for you, my parents. It’s all I can muster for you,
and it’s as much as you deserve. This is where your long efforts
to shut me down begin to pay off.
A. Vague:
Eyes go wide and blank. Forehead smoothes.
Mouth in slim smile, smiling at nothing in particular. I can’t remember
anything specific. I don’t make any statements or declarations.
I am milk. I am fresh white bread. I am an indifferent thing, requiring
no attention. I look out the window dimly. You ask me a question and I
blink, startled. I can’t really say. I don’t really know.
I’m not sure. What was it again? Oh, I might say softly, yes. Yes,
I forgot.
B. Angry:
Eyes go hard and narrow. Mouth in straight
line. I measure my hatred for you in long steady stares. I can barely
contain how loathsome you are. I am fury. I am steam. I am fist. You are
so stupid, I can barely stand to talk to you. I hate the way you look.
I hate the sound of your voice. I hate your smell. I know what you’ll
do or say next, and I hate you for it. If it were up to me, I would never
see you again as long as I live. I would leave. I would kill you. I would
not let you hide from my knowing, from the way that I know you and will
not forgive you.

W. MASONIC VIEW
During an argument my mother says to me,
You think life stops when you’re not here? We have to adjust our
whole lives when you get back. Just as we get into a good rhythm, you
come back.

My mother as a Picasso painting. Here
are her ears, down here by the ovals of her knees. She is done in browns
and reds and maroons and earth tones. She always complains that she was
not made sensibly but then I see her using the too-long arm to reach out
of her frame and pluck a piggy-in-a-blanket from the tray carried past.
She winks at me then, from one of the breasts that she carries inside
a triangle near her foot.Her thighs are square pillars,
set outside of her head. Her ears are at the bottom of the frame, tucked
in a pile of fruit. There is evidence of drunkenness on the part of the
painter. He’s given her face too many expressions at once.

W. WALNUT ST.
It is a Fourth of July picnic and my father
is drunk. His wife is a bitch. We are on the mall in D.C., waiting for
fireworks. It is pouring rain. My sister mutters about how stupid we all
are and walks away from us. I hold an umbrella low over my head so I don’t
have to look at anyone. Four more years and I am rid of them all.

W. MASONIC VIEW
My mother would get paychecks, or extra
money, and go shopping. She would come home with full bags. Blouses, knickknacks,
an expensive hand-cut picture frame. Shoes, belts, necklaces. My sister
and I would sit, stones in the living room, while she showed us what she
bought. Usually something for us, too.
There was so much else we couldn’t
afford. Food or doctor’s bills, new shoes or movies, books or haircuts
or paper goods . . .
My father was right when he complained about
the way she spent money, but we could say nothing to him.
Every month she sat at her desk and sent
handwritten letters to her creditors with a check for ten dollars each.
She used her blue fountain pen and nice stationary. Until, she wrote,
I’m able to send more.

This is what you really want: you want
Willa Mulhollan’s family.
You go there early one Fourth of July morning.
You leave whichever one of your parents’ houses, gleeful that they
won’t be ruining your holiday, and you walk the mile to Willa’s
house.
Everybody’s around the dining room
table when you get there, in their pajamas, eating pancakes in the sun.
When you come in, they shout hello, and make room at the table for you.
Willa’s nine-year-old sister begs you to sit next to her. They give
you pancakes and coffee. Willa’s baby sister is making snorting
noises that make everyone laugh. You feel the brick of tension that lives
in your shoulders spontaneously begin to dissolve. As if it is trickling
down your back.
After breakfast, everybody helps clear the
table. You and Willa go upstairs and lounge around her bedroom. You play
albums, look at old notes passed in school, talk about the boys you like.
You tell Willa how great you think her family is and she shrugs, smiles
kindly at you, and says, “They’re an okay bunch.”
Around noon, you take turns showering and
she gives you a big white robe, her mom’s, to put on. You sit down,
clean and wet, wrapped in Willa’s pretty mother’s robe and
the brick is completely gone. You feel great. You and Willa start laughing
about something. You can’t stop laughing. Everything is so funny
and you feel so great.
You get dressed and go down to the kitchen.
You help Willa’s mother make the picnic. You slice red peppers and
fill a large baggie with them. You’re wearing Willa’s eye
shadow and her cute blue shirt and your hair is drying fluffy and looks
nice when you pass a mirror. You spend the afternoon letting Willa’s
nine-year-old sister hang around with you. You and Willa exchange wise
glances over her head. You and Willa are cool, older chicks.
At six o’clock, you all get in the
car and drive to the Potomac River. You spread out blankets and everyone
sits or stretches out on them. Everyone has a book to read, or music to
listen to, or a game to play. Willa’s father listens to rock and
roll on headphones. He taps a sandaled foot on the grass.
You are situated right across the river
from D.C., in a perfect spot to see the fireworks over the Washington
Monument. You are so happy, you can barely stand it. You almost start
crying, in the middle of it all, because you’re so grateful to be
there.
Everyone eats the picnic. You eat the red
peppers out of the baggie with everyone else and they taste like you feel—crisp,
red, shining.
Night begins to settle over all the families
on blankets. Sparklers break the darkness, voices spill across the grass,
boats fill the river, small green and red fireworks spark the water bright.
Then, real fireworks. The whorling, shooting,
streaming, brilliant, falling light. The booming, the crackling. Willa’s
mother and baby sister whisper in cadence, “Ooooooo, pretty.”
You see their soft faces pressed together, their big matching eyes reflecting
the lights. They rock gently, say “Oooo” again, and wonder
breaks like a firecracker inside you.
Then you do cry a little, because it is
everything you ever wanted, it is all so ordinary and good-humored and
sweet, and you know that soon you will be dropped off at your mother’s
or father’s, one of the non-homes that you non-inhabit, and someone
will speak to you or not, be nice or not, and you think, you know, that
you loved this day, and just as much, you will wish you had never known
it.

W. MASONIC VIEW, W. WALNUT ST., W. MASONIC VIEW, W. WALNUT ST.
I carry an envelope at the bottom of my
garbage bag when I move between houses. Inside there are letters my parents
have sent to each other about me. I’ve written Hate Mail on the
envelope, and I can’t leave it in either house. I don’t know
why I have copies of the letters. I read them every so often, even though
they make me feel sick.

I dreamt my mother was a giant turtle.
In the dream, I saved her from committing suicide. Or maybe I didn’t.
I couldn’t remember when I woke up.

W. WALNUT ST.
My father and stepmother drink wine with
dinner, a couple of bottles. When my sister comes over occasionally, she
and I drink it, too. It makes conversation easier. My stepmother’s
face gets ruddy when she drinks. She tells stories about her family in
Michigan. My sister tells stories about her friends. My father tells funny
stories about work, listens to everyone else’s stories attentively,
laughs appreciatively.
I don’t know what I say, or who I
become, but it doesn’t matter, because of course it isn’t
me, and it keeps the evening peaceful.

My father’s heart is a callus.
A yellowed, horned knob of muscle. He has worked a long time to get his
heart so hard, so shelled and protected and secret. I want to pry for
it, dig it out with my fingers, my nails. I want to breathe on it, soak
it in blood, bring it to beating again. He ignores my attempts to get
his attention.
I dance wildly with knives. I dip my whole
body in India ink. I do cartwheels on the roof of a moving car. I grow
two heads. I eat fire. I scream out songs hysterically while skipping
rope. Finally, one day, while I am running a full-blown flea circus, the
little acrobat family like miracles winging blackly through the air, I
catch him bent across from me, looking through the tiny fanfare, staring
at my face. I smile eagerly.
He says, “You look just like your
mother.” And then he turns away.

STERLING AVE.
We were four people, a family. (Then we
were versions of three or two and then an added fourth, but mostly two,
and then, and forever after, one.)

There are miles of knots that need
untying. Confusions, wishes, misunderstandings, beliefs. Each one has
to be carefully slipped free, untied, patiently, lovingly. It is as if
the knots are made of strips of my own living muscle. It is that uncomfortable,
that dangerous.
What if the next thing untied turns out
to be the knot that held me together?

W. WALNUT ST.
Every other Monday, I vacuumed the bright
green rug in the room I stayed in at my father’s house. I put all
of my things in drawers or in a box in the closet. Nothing was to be left
on the vanity. Books, hairbrush, lotion, the two stuffed animals I kept
there, all put away. I wiped down the table and the mirror. I took the
sheets off the bed and put them in the washer, made up the bed with new
sheets. I used neat army corners, and tucked the pillow into the cover.
So it could be a guest room, just in case.

The anger that dwells in here: a searing
lava mudslide that will slide down over you, over your precious houses,
all your precious belongings. Over all the antiques, artwork, books, exotic
knickknacks, appliances, and rugs that you are somehow able to find a
home for, even though living, breathing I have long had nowhere to go
but me. Here it is, the mudslide, it finds your clawfooted furniture,
your porcelains, your mouths and throats. Your eyes fill up, your hair
clots, your hands curl against the weight. Your legs are burned, boiled,
pinned. You are bent around the dining room table, scorched, soiled black
bone, until windows heat and fill and shatter, until the walls of your
houses collapse around you, until the remains, with you inside, smolder,
and cool, and harden.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
After the landlord suddenly sold the house
we were living in, we rented another house. It had huge windows in the
front. My sister graduated from high school and was supposed to join American
Field Service and go to France. There was a problem. She was sent to Tunisia,
Africa, instead. She left for Africa, and I was alone with our parents.
The reports we got were bad. She was used
as a servant until it was discovered and then she was sent to a new family.
Her sister in the new family was jealous of her.
I wrote her one letter the whole year. I
said something like, Everything is the same here, you know.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
My mother said the huge windows made the
house feel like a fishbowl. With my sister gone, and those huge windows
in front of me every day, I felt exposed. I tried not to look out the
huge windows when I passed them, just in case someone was watching.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
My mother makes gateaux. Tall piles of crepes
filled with various things. Spinach, chicken, mushrooms. She invites people
over, friends from church, from work. They have parties with candles and
wine and she brings out the gateaux. I hate the gateaux passionately.
She works on them for hours, cooking crepes, making fillings, saying things
to me like, What kind of cheese layer, do you think?
At the parties, everyone says to me, Isn’t
your mother a wonder? Isn’t she creative? Can’t she cook?
Isn’t she something?
It’s my fourth year of joint custody,
and there are two more years ahead. I look across the room to my mother,
who is bent in the lamplight, refilling someone’s wine, her necklace
swinging away from her body gracefully, and I cannot be charmed by her.
She will never save me, the way I hoped she would. She will not be the
one, as I imagined, to stand up for me, to say on my behalf, She has done
enough. She needs to stop. Damn the agreement. She will stay with me.
I am the last link between my parents, and
my mother will not relinquish this. She cannot bear to become an ex, a
has-been, a past-tense thing. She cannot bear to fall from my father’s
thoughts completely, even though she barely likes him anymore. She is
afraid of being no one’s love, or even no one’s past love.
Because of her fears, she will not save me. I know this now. I watch her
at her parties, and I feel my love for her slam shut, like a book whose
ending I can’t bear to read.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
Somehow my best friend and I got a case
of Schlitz beer. I carried it from her house in a guitar case. People
came over after school. The beer was warm. The boys sat at the top of
the stairs and threw empty cans into our wicker, frog-shaped trash can.
Everybody laughed a lot. Nobody hooked up. We had The Police playing on
the stereo. I drank a lot. They all left at five. My mother was due at
six. I cleaned up and passed out on my bed, quite drunk.
When she woke me up, I thought I was getting
a phone call and answered, Hello? Hello? I was holding the sheet to my
ear like a telephone. My mother narrowed her eyes at me in a particular
way. She turned and left. After a while, I went down for interrogation.
I was still drunk. She told me to unload the dishwasher, and while I did
it, she called my father.
She told him it was his fault I was an alcoholic
and he better get over and talk to me this minute. I could hear my father’s
reluctance.
He came and we walked around the block.
I was relieved to get away from my mother’s heat and rage. I don’t
remember him yelling at me or anything. I was secretly happy to see him,
alone, on an off-week. He seemed sorry we were there, doing that.

My father as a Henry Moore sculpture.
Someone else’s thumbs marking him, forming him. His mother. His
first wife. His second wife. They have pressed it all out of him. They
have turned him into crests, shallow wells, the ridges of their imprints.
His daughters refrain. They will not put
their thumbs upon him. They disguise themselves as men. They pretend to
be unemotional jokesters, practical, logical, scientific types. They want
to know what was there before. They hide their female thumbs from him.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
I used to unscrew the pump on my mother’s
hand lotion and spit into it. Sometimes I squatted in her shower and peed
without washing it down. Nothing short of true violence would have expressed
my rage at her. So I did these other things.

THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER
At a friend’s house, I meet a kid
who lives on the same street I live on with my mother. He grew up here.
He describes his house to me and I shake my head, No, I don’t know
which one he means.
It is a short street, there are only about
ten houses on it. He looks at me, frustrated, and describes it again.
Oh, I lie, yes, I know which one you mean.
He is relieved, I remember now, laughs and
confides in me that he would have thought it pretty weird if I didn’t
know, seeing as there were so few houses on the street and all.

W. WINDSOR AVE., THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER, W. WINDSOR,
THE STREET
My first therapist, X, was paid for by my
father. She hypnotized me once and when I awoke, I felt happy and relaxed.
She began meeting with my father and stepmother to discuss me. Then, when
I went to see her, she began saying things like, “Your father and
stepmother are only trying to do their best by you. Your mother, you see,
is not allowing them the freedom to love you.”
My second therapist, Y, was free through
the high school. With Y, I drank raspberry tea in a tapestried room in
the heart of the cold school. She began meeting with my mother to discuss
me. Then, when I went to see her, she began saying things like, “Your
mother loves you very much. She feels abandoned in parenthood by your
father’s marriage. You see, she’s outnumbered as a parent
. . .”
Eventually, therapist X, therapist Y, my
mother, father, and stepmother decided a unified meeting was in order
to discuss me. We met in therapist X’s office. Right away, everyone
began to argue. Even X and Y got angry and raised their voices.
I slipped out, after a while.

GRAND VIEW DR.
The landlord decides to move into the big
window house himself. My mother and I have to move again. My sister is
still in Africa. We have to find a house without her, which seems terrible.
There is a house that wins us over, though.
It has a breakfast porch and a screen porch and a fireplace. One bedroom
has a low ceiling and windows close to the floor. It has been a long time
since I want anything as much as I want that room.
My mother takes it, and every two weeks
I live there with her in the room that seems like it was meant to be mine.
Every two weeks, though, I leave for my father’s and stepmother’s
house, and she is alone.

If there are trolls in a story, my
father is a king troll. My mother is an old witch troll. My stepmother
is a seamstress troll. Each one of them is greedy for something, goes
about getting it their own way. The king wants power. The witch wants
power. The seamstress wants power. There is a ruby bracelet in question.
They all want it. They deceive. They use cruelty. They wage war against
one another in their caves.
The seamstress tricks with flattery. The
witch wields outrageous spells. The king measures out approval and approbation.
They undermine each other’s power. They become consumed with their
fighting. They are trolls, so their poor behavior is forgiven them, and
eventually they grow older. They forget about their struggles, they forget
about each other.
Where is the bracelet now?

W. WINDSOR AVE.
It is an ugly, orange, brick, square house.
Inside are my father and his wife. They leave their dishes after they
eat. Dried meat blood. Hard potato smears. Tomato juice in veins on the
china. They stay in their bedroom, which smells musty, and of dried skin,
when they open the door. They hide their toothpaste and shampoo, saying
in ugly voices, your mother should buy you that.
Sometimes I wash their dishes, even though
it embarrasses all of us.

GRAND VIEW DR.
My sister comes back and goes away again,
to college. Money is tight again. My mother decides to rent out a room
to make extra money. The woman who comes to rent it wears her hair in
a tight bush around her head. My room is the most separate, so it is the
one that has to be rented. I move out of my room with the low ceilings
and big windows and she moves in. I move into my sister’s room.
The woman only ever uses one shelf in the
fridge and none of her food reveals her. She likes dairy, this is all
I know. Cottage cheese, wrapped slices of American cheese, milk. She keeps
her door closed and I try to walk quietly when I pass it. I look through
the keyhole once when she isn’t home, but the bit of floor I can
see is just my old yellow carpet.

Oh, that I will be something less.
That I will accept what I shouldn’t,
that I will make do with what is not enough, that I am so parched for
love it will ruin, one by one, all my possible futures.
Oh, that I should end up miserable, that
all my optimism gets me a black hole I claim is white, a cup of sawdust
I claim is wine, a brutal loneliness I claim is solidarity of self.
Oh, that I should tell you someday that
I am sorry. That I didn’t live up to the possibilities it was my
gift to see, that I let possibility starve and curl and break off from
the fiber of me.

W. WALNUT ST., THE STREET WHOSE NAME I CAN’T REMEMBER, W. WINDSOR
AVE., GRAND VIEW DR.
These are the places my sister left me.
She was right to do it. She had a sense
of survival I lacked.
But without her, there was no one to speak
for me.

My sister as a color, the color red.
A dark red. The color of lipstick, the color of velvet, the color of blood,
the color of wine, the color of passion, the color of chafed skin, the
color of cold cheeks, the color of mouths kissed, the color of berries,
the heart muscle, pomegranates.

W. WINDSOR, GRAND VIEW
When I gave up, it helped. I slept through
afternoon shadows and into the dark of evening. My parents stopped moving
to new houses, but I kept on moving between them. I looked at their faces
and did not see them. I responded to their voices and did not listen.
Before I was asked to, I washed dishes at my father’s house, I vacuumed
my mother’s rugs. I wanted no altercations, no interactions at all.
I felt that this blankness was a triumph of self-control. I stopped feeling
things for them, about them, from them. I believed that I would leave
them after high school and be free.

EIGHTEEN YEARS LATERThis is like lifting a heavy, sopping
thing from inside you. Like laying it out on the table for discussion,
inspection, scientific study. It is like saying to people who have known
you, this is what I have been carrying, why I have not been quite right.
Here I am. I’m in a room full of empty
boxes from the liquor store. This is the third time that I’ve broken
a relationship in half, divided the furniture, negotiated pet custody,
looked at pictures on walls and labeled them mentally: mine, not mine.
I’ve had thirty-six jobs, I’ve moved seventeen times. My oldest
friends complain that I’m inconsistent, that I don’t give
steady emotional support. The lovers whose hearts I’ve broken are
so wounded they never speak to me again.
I never thought this was what I would become.
I thought that living on the fringe of a life was something in my past,
part of being a joint-custody child, but now I see that it is where I
still live.
And still. I hope that these words, like
strong, black sutures, will sew my two halves back together. I hope that
there is a chance I will find a home, a place where I can stay. Maybe
it’s true, maybe I will find such a place, but first there is the
packing to do.